But employees have done a pretty good job, it would seem from looking at HP’s stats. Based on last fall’s annual filing when the company had 349,600 employees, each of them brought in $363,973 in revenue.
How does that compare to rivals? It’s less than at Dell (DELL), whose fiscal year ended last February, its 109,400 employees (including 2,700 temps) brought in $567,376 each.

But it’s more than at IBM (IBM), whose whopping 433,362 employees brought in just $140,116 each.

And yet in terms of profits, IBM is the most successful of the three companies.

Looking at profits per employee, each HP employee brought in $20,157, each Dell employee brought in $32,727, and each IBM employee brought in $36,586.

IBM has five business units: Global Technology Services, Global Business Services, Software, Systems and Technology and Global Financing. Last year those had gross margins of 35%, 29%, 88.5%, 40%, and 50% respectively.

Summed up, IBM sells a lot of consulting and software. That avoids messy manufacturing costs and comes with higher margins. That’s particularly true for software, which last year was 23% of total sales, but IBM stated it expects about half of its profit to come from software by 2015.